Category: Personal Reflection
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The apo-collapse
In April 2024 I asked myself a question and then didn’t answer it. Back then I was writing a blog post about “model collapse”, the unsettling metaphor for what happens when an AI trains on its own output, degrading generation after generation like a digital case of mad cow disease. I then began to wonder…
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Making extreme weather personal, again: Wildfires in the US, the UK and Germany
On 4 August a wildfire started near where my twin sister lives in New Mexico. This was not unprecedented. Indeed I have written here on the blog about fires there in 2011 and in 2022. What was unprecedented was that I heard about it in the middle of seeing pictures of wildfires all over the…
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Making Science Public in a chaotic world
As you know, I am now gradually moving from my old ‘Making Science Public’ blog home at the University of Nottingham to my new personal blog home here. This wasn’t easy and lots of people supported me directly or indirectly in this move (by listening to my whining). You know who you are, and I…
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‘The most important book I ever read’: Francis Crick and children’s encyclopaedias
Matthew Cobb has written a biography of Francis Crick (1916-2004), one of molecular biology’s foremost scholars. It will come out in November. While writing the book, he posted, as he does with every book he writes, little snippets of information on Bluesky along the way – letters, photos, passages of notes he couldn’t quite decipher,…
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Being all at sea
It’s summer, but it isn’t. It is intermittently grey and rainy and stormy, with a few days of sunshine in between. In another year without a summer, namely 1816, Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, or so the myth goes* …. If she could sit in the Villa Diodati in gloomy weather and write, why can’t I,…
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Evelyn Fox Keller (1936-2023)
On 22 September 2023 Evelyn Fox Keller sadly passed away at the age of 87. She had been a theoretical physicist, a mathematical biologist, a feminist philosopher, a historian of science, and an inspiration to many across these fields. She integrated insights from all these fields creatively and critically, and, most importantly, she added some…
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Knitting with hyperlinks: A decade of blogging
Ten years ago, I was walking down the corridor in the School of Sociology and Social Policy building, when I bumped into Adrian Mateo, who was then Faculty marketing manager. I knew him from various engagement events related to projects I was involved in at the time. We chatted a bit and he suddenly asked…
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‘It’s not a retoot is it?’ Moving between platforms and languages
The question in the title was asked by Aris Katzourakis on Mastodon, the now well-known decentralized social network built on open web standards by a non-profit. In this little post I’ll tell the story of how I came to explore a new social world, including a new language. *** I joined Twitter about a decade…
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Chris Toumey (1949-2022)
Chris Robinson has just told me the sad news that Chris Toumey (a cultural anthropologist who worked at the University of South Carolina) has died very suddenly. Chris was a kindred spirit and a fantastic science communicator. So, instead of writing an obituary, I’ll tell you a little personal story about engagement, energy, enthusiasm and…
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Moving on and getting on with it
Phrasal verbs are interesting. You have verbs, like ‘move’ and ‘get’ for example. But you also have so-called phrasal verbs, verbs that are made up of a main verb together with an adverb or a preposition, or both, such as ‘move on’, in, out, over or ‘get on’, in, out, over etc., or even ‘move…